Terrycloth Mother
by rowdymouse
Summary: Tony's faced with a hard task: providing Jeff all the love he never got and desperately needs.


Before your parents first brought you to see him, they told you he was raised by robots. You laughed. It seemed awfully funny to you, until you actually met him.

He was your age, but you wouldn't know it-shorter, and so very thin, as though meals had been hard to come by. He was towheaded and far too pale.

He did not look at you. He hugged his knees and he sat in the corner, where he could look _toward_ people but not _at_ them as he rocked back and forth. He shivered like he was freezing cold, and squinted like the room's fluorescent lights were too bright.

You hung close to your dad for safety as the two of you walked toward him. He seemed like a wild thing, and maybe he was. He might hurt you.

"This is my son," your father said to him, and nudged you forward.

He didn't look at either of you-just kept on rocking back and forth and staring. "Can he hear?" you said, and looked up at your father.

He sighed. "He hears fine," he told you, and he took your hand.

You hung around your dad in the days to follow, going to work with him so you could watch this strange boy. You tried to give him some of the cookies your mother helped you make. And you offered him toys, mostly stuffed animals. He looked like he could use some stuffed animals.

He never took what you gave him, not yet. But once he looked at you-really looked at you, met your eyes-and pinned you to the wall with that hollow green stare. Something caught in your throat. Your breath quickened.

And then he looked away, at the blank white wall, and went back to humming and rocking.

A few days later when you'd come to see him, he was nowhere to be found. Your dad told you they were giving him some tests. That frightened you deeply, somehow. You sat around, trembling and anxious, and waited for him to emerge.

After a few hours one of the matrons carried him out in her arms. He was struggling a little, but gave up, and soon rested limp against her shoulder. They set him in the middle of the room, and soon he teetered over to his corner, settled in, and started shifting back and forth again.

You crept toward him. "So what'd they do to you?" you said, and you tried to smile at him. "Was it a hard test?"

He didn't answer you, of course, and you didn't know why you asked at all.

The results came back in a few days and the grown-ups played coy with you for a while, but eventually you heard one of them say the words _severe mental retardation_ and you had to ask your father what they meant.

He told you, and told you honestly, and you were furious. "He's not stupid," you said to him. "I've seen it in his eyes. He's plenty smart."

Your father just shrugged and sighed, and it made you so frustrated. Soon they were bandying around other words, like they were trying to stick labels to this robot boy to see what would stick. It didn't make a lick of sense to you. You didn't see why they were so convinced that he was _artistic_ in the slightest.

But everything changed when you brought him Lego. You walked up to him with the bin, and set it down next to him. You took out some of the bricks and held them out. "Do you know what this is?"

He looked over at it slowly.

"It's called Lego," you said with the infinite gravity that three-year-olds are so wonderful at. "You can fit these together, see?" You pressed two bricks together, blue and yellow, and held them up. "You can build anything. It's terrific."

His lips parted. He reached out and plucked it with perfect delicacy from your hand, and turned it over carefully. Slowly, gingerly, he tried to pull them apart-then harder. The one block popped into two, and he jolted and stared down at them both, breath coming swift and irregular.

You smiled at him a little, shy and nervous, then pushed the bin toward him. He paused, then leaned to peek over the side-as if it might hurt him if he touched the edge-and his eyes went giant. You couldn't read him, not usually, but here it was clear what he was thinking. _So very many!_

He reached in and took out several with that plastic crunch, and set them down in front of himself. He stared at them blankly before he started to sort them, very carefully, by size and shape and colour. He took _hours_. And you watched him, and handed him more blocks when he ran out, and soon every single Lego block was out and on the floor and fastidiously sorted.

In the end you had to go home, and you had to put away the Lego you brought. He watched and stared with unmitigated horror as you ruined his work. "I'm sorry," you told him, over and over, but he didn't seem to understand.

You kept on bringing your toys, and he kept on sorting and grouping. He even took a shine to one of your teddy bears, a brown raggedy thing that he would press his face into and hug ferociously until you thought he would hurt it.

One night you walked away while he still had it. He stared after you and let out a strange, distressed keening sound, the noise he had started to make when something in the world was out of place.

You turned back to look at him. "It's okay," you said, and meant it. "It's yours now. You love it better than I do."

He worked his jaw for a long moment, and then he pinned you with his stare again, very deliberately.

"Thank you," he said, so thin and quiet, and it was the first thing you had ever heard him say.

Soon he had an appetite. Soon he was growing. He shot up two inches in the first month, and in a few more he was taller than you. His hair went from being thin and brittle to growing thicker and glossier. He put on weight, but even though he wasn't looking so sickly anymore he was still so very achingly thin.

He figured out Lego eventually, but it seemed to take him forever. Soon he was pressing them together into strange shapes. Soon he was stacking them. And soon-_soon!_-well, suddenly their diagnosis of _artistic_ made better sense, didn't it?

You walked in after lunch with your dad, one day, and he was sitting there in his corner and putting the finishing touches on a high, narrow box in blue and yellow and red and green, with a roof like a pyramid. Somehow it seemed very pretty to you, and far more elaborate and strange than anything you would think to do. He looked over and saw you, and nudged it forward wordlessly with a foot.

You wandered toward it and peered, and he gave you one of his thousand-metre stares.

"How long did it take you?" you said, and smiled at him.

He smiled back, showing his teeth like a wild animal. You were pretty sure he had never done that before, either. "Not very," he said.

You brought him outside once, into the sun, and he squinted and gasped and covered his eyes. You were scared you'd hurt him somehow, so you brought him back in and hunted down the matrons and apologized to them so frantically, and they just laughed at you. (Alien boy. Robot boy. Vampire boy.)

His fear subsided and was replaced by a strange solemn grace. Soon he stopped shaking and hugging himself. Soon he could be touched. He didn't flinch anymore, and you could hold his hand, and his skin seemed so smooth. You figured out pretty fast that he liked to be held, so very tightly, like he held that stuffed bear. You would take him in your arms and squeeze him until you thought you would hurt him, and you could feel his heart fluttering in his chest.

The first time you felt that, something twinged in you, delighted and guilty at once, and you didn't know what.

He started to talk more. Sometimes his words didn't make sense; there were too many, or they came too slowly or too fast, or they weren't quite right. But eventually he could hold a conversation, reluctant and halting.

When he got to that point is when you heard them talking about testing him again. This seemed like a very good idea to you. You knew you'd be proven right. They took him one day, and he walked into that room with his strange solemnity. He walked out just as calm.

A few days later your father took you aside and told you, very seriously, that you had been right. Your blond robot boy was smart. Very, _very_ smart.

You felt awfully smug. You'd known it ever since you'd seen those eyes.

And after they tested him they took him away from you. He stopped living at the school and the teachers started to pass him around between their homes. It was a gradual process-one matron would have him for a year, then a professor and his wife would have him for two, and so on. Your family never took in your space alien friend. But he was still brought by to see you regularly. Everyone said you were very good for him.

They figured out that he was squinting because his eyes were bad, not because he was overstimulated, and soon he had glasses. They were awfully thick and seemed like they should be heavy. His stare became even more calm-and his eyes were so very big. And as he became less of a robot, and more of a human being, some of that eerie calm left him for an owlish, curious peering. You almost missed that unearthly quality of his, but you would never tell him that.

(He started building things, finding them and breaking them and putting them back together again. He told you that the matron who took him was furious once when she came home to find every clock in the house in pieces on the floor. You'd like to think the terrible haircut she made him get was punishment, but he didn't even seem to notice it was so bad.)

He got better at being outside. He freckled in the sun, and his hair went from mousy white to burnished gold. One summer, when the snow melted, you lay out in the gray-green grass with him on the moor. You rested your head on his chest and shut your eyes, and he'd even run his fingers through your hair without you asking. Gestures like that were starting to come to him without anyone prompting. (You liked it. It made something in your heart open and bloom like a flower.)

"What was it like, before?" you said.

"Before what?"

"Before you came to Snow Wood."

He tensed so hard you could feel it, and he left off caressing your hair for a moment. "I don't remember," he said.

He was always a very bad liar, like he'd missed out on learning that in his first three years of life. You turned your head to look at him, and maybe he felt guilty. Or maybe he took that as a prompt. He misread you sometimes, very badly.

He inhaled, harsh and ragged. "Well, I don't remember a lot," he said. "Everything was metal. And it was very dark. And there were these machines there, to take care of me, and one of them was to keep me warm, and one of them was to feed me. And one of them tried to teach me to talk, but I guess it wasn't very good, huh?" He looked at you and trilled a high, thin, effeminate giggle like yours, but so much more nervous.

You had never heard any of this before. You'd been scared to ask. It all seemed so very impossible to you, but then, you weren't really sure what you'd thought he'd come from, anyway. You stared down at him for a long time. "Where were your parents?" you said, so very bewildered.

And he turned his head away and you thought he was angry at you for you asking, until you realized he was trembling. You put your arms around him, like you used to when he was frailer and weaker and balled up in the corner, and you held him while he wept there in the grass. And when he lay still you kissed his cheek and wiped away his tears, and you two held each other then, two boys fending off dark sick loneliness.

Eventually you both put in for admission to Snow Wood. You both got in. That was an obvious development, as far as you were concerned. Your parents taught there, and your friend was an off-the-charts genius, so it made perfect sense to you that you'd both be admitted. You two put in for a room together and soon you weren't just best friends, you were roommates.

You watched him grow, in every way. He kept on getting taller but he never really filled out, giving him a lean, bony, awkward look into adolescence. He tested into the best math and science classes. He eased up more and learned how to be with people, and he started making friends. (You weren't jealous of them.) The school fostered his mechanical talents, and soon he was staying up late into the night to build extravagant _things_ that he'd try and fail to explain to you, but you didn't care, because you could listen to him talk for hours, and when he got excited about his work the hairs on the back of your neck prickled. You remembered how he'd been before, and how he was now, and how they'd actually been so daft as to call him mentally retarded when he wouldn't look at people or speak.

You were so very proud of him. Soon you couldn't bear to be apart from him for long. When he looked at you and smiled, that warm feeling in your chest grew and spread and filled you and it felt so very wonderful.

As that feeling grew it got to the point where you could name it. Basking turned to horror. Horror turned to acceptance. You guess you'd always known you were a fairy, anyway.

You were painfully aware that you could manipulate him. He was socially competent at this point, but was convinced he wasn't. You could have told him that of course boys share beds, of course they hug and kiss each other, and of course they-well-

You never, ever told him those things. You were very careful not to do that or even insinuate, though it occurred to you more than once. You forced yourself to settle for imagining that he loved you every time he smiled at you.

Somehow it had never occurred to you before that your robot boy (pretty, pretty robot boy) had a surname. He didn't have family, and was never adopted, so why should he have one? Nobody had ever used it. But when you both went off to school, you found out he still had his father's name. And you were outraged.

"He didn't ever do anything for you!" you said once, waving your arms at him, like you expected him to put in for a name change right now.

You remember how he shifted his weight from foot to foot, and looked down at his trainers like he felt terribly guilty. "But he's my dad," he said. He looked so small, even though he was a whole head taller than you now. He paused. "And I'm more like him than-"

You took him by the lapel of his uniform and pulled him forward. "Look at me," you said.

He swallowed and looked down at you, dutifully.

You pointed your finger at the hollow sunken place on his sternum. "Don't ever say that again," you said low.

"...what?"

"Don't ever..." You were shaking. "Don't ever say you're anything like him again. He hurt you. You're nothing like him. You're better than him."

He looked down at you like he didn't understand, but just nodded, giving you one of his owlish looks as you let him go. You wouldn't press your point.

One day in your biology class you read about baby monkeys who were separated from their mothers. The scientists gave them hard structures made of wire that had bottles, for when they wanted to eat, and warm structures made of terrycloth for them to cling to when they were cold or sad. The monkeys grew up stunted and strange. When their surrogate mothers were removed from them they couldn't function. They rocked and stared. Some of them hurt themselves.

Some of them recovered from this and became normal, happy, functioning monkeys. But most of them died. None of this was lost on you.

And you learned about your friend's father. You knew why that surname seemed familiar, now: he was a scientist, one of the finest minds of his generation, studying high-speed particle physics and ingenious hybridization techniques, both of which had earned him Nobel prizes. They said that if anyone could develop time travel, it was probably him, and that he'd change the world with his genetics research.

You had trouble looking at your friend the same way after that. It wasn't even that his father-his inhuman, uncaring father-was doing work of such a high calibre. It was the hybridization. His scintillating intelligence, his impossible dexterity and hand-eye coordination: suddenly these seemed eerie. You very deliberately never brought it up. You expected he'd considered the possibility, and you couldn't imagine how much it hurt.

You never loved him any less for it.

And maybe that was what clued them in. Or maybe how you clung to him, smiled when he smiled, cared for him when he despaired. Regardless: one day, toward the end, one of the matrons pulled you into her office. She sat you down perfunctorily in a chair that was far too big for you-you'd swear they got them that way on purpose, just to make you feel small-and poured you out a cup of tea while the snow fell in bright silence outside the window. "How are you today, Tony?" she said.

"I'm fine," you said, and crossed your legs, so very dainty.

"Cream? Sugar?"

This was not usual. You knew you were in trouble, and not the sort where you'd get taken aside and beaten with a ruler. This was something far more insidious and far worse.

"Two lumps," you said, and solemnly watched her drop them in.

She took her seat behind her desk, steepled her fingers, and considered you over the rims of her spectacles as you sipped your tea. "We're worried about you and Jeff Andonuts," she said. They always called him by his full name.

Your eyes widened and you watched her through the tea's steam.

"You two are very close, aren't you?"

You nodded a little, slowly. "I knew him since he came here. My father was one of the people on his case."

"You've done a lot of good work for him," she said. Normally that would have cheered you. Now it didn't.

"Thanks," you said, hollow.

She folded up her hands so very neatly and stared at you. "It's awfully hard being a boy, isn't it, Tony?"

"Pardon, matron?"

"Suddenly you have..." She nodded, once, primly. "Desires."

You stared down into your swirling tea, uneasily. "It's alright," the matron said. "Nothing to be ashamed of. Every boy's got them. It's all a matter of what you do with them."

You didn't say a word.

"Your desires are still very malleable," she said. "Like clay. You're in a formative period. So is Jeff Andonuts. The things and the people you surround yourself with, the thoughts you permit yourself to think, these things shape the desires you have now and those you'll have for the rest of your life."

"I don't understand."

"Everyone has _some_ unnatural desires, Tony. But it's a matter of what you cultivate. And what you do. And what you promote in others, of course. He's very vulnerable, isn't he? And his sanity's very fragile. Runs in the family."

All of a sudden you felt very ill. You leaned forward and set the china teacup down, where the saucer rested on her desk.

She was still watching you. "You know about his early years."

"I know enough."

"His father's an impulsive sort. He's an alumnus, you know."

"I know." _And if he weren't,_ you thought, _you'd have reported him to the police straightaway for child abuse-_

"He does what feels good, or seems like a good idea, without worrying about the consequences, or the morals or ethics of the matter. Do you follow?"

You swallowed.

"We don't want to have to take you away from your friend."

"I don't want you to have to take me away from him, either," you said quietly.

She leaned back and studied you for a moment. "We have plenty of resources," she said, "to help boys to deal with problems like this. It's much easier when you're young. We hope that if you need the help you'll ask for it."

You nodded a little.

"You know our policies." She paused, judiciously. "If we catch you, that is. And we wouldn't want to have to put you in different rooms, as a preemptive measure. You have been so very good for him. We wouldn't want you to do him any ill."

"Yes, matron."

She stood up and smiled at you. "I'm sure you'll do the right thing for yourself. -and for him. You can go now, Tony."

When you got back to your room, he was curled up reading on his bed and you thought you'd never seen him so sullen. He peeked up from his book at you. "Somebody ratted us out," he said, so bitter, and shut his book.

Your heart skipped.

"They dragged me in and asked if I had anything to confess. And they kept on prying, talking about how they'd have to split us up." He huffed a sigh. "So I told them about the sodium I had stored out by the bike shed. They seemed pretty surprised, and beat me right sore. Two weeks' detention for contraband, too. What's wrong?"

You nodded, and licked your lips, lowering your eyes. "They brought me in too."

"You didn't confess to anything?"

"Tight-lipped, that's me." You shook your head.

He finally eased up, and grinned across at you, like he never could have done before you. "You're a real friend," he said. "I couldn't stand it if they took me away from you."

You smiled, a little. "Me neither."

That was a few weeks before you found him packing to leave.

It was so sudden, so unreasonable. His stirring woke you up, and you found him standing there in the moonlight, getting dressed, a bag next to him on the floor.

When he saw you were awake, he startled and gave you a long terrified alien stare, the sort you hadn't seen in twelve years. You stared at him, and you met eyes with him, and your heart broke, because you knew, somehow, that everything had been building to this point.

"You're leaving," you said.

He looked down and away-he wouldn't look you in the eyes, and that hurt _so much_-as he did up his tie with those long, thin, impossibly nimble fingers. "Nn," he said.

You folded your lips together very tightly. "Where?"

He took a deep, shuddering breath, like it hurt him too. "I have to go to Eagleland," he said.

"What," you said, "are you going to walk to Eagleland?"

"I don't know," he said, and his voice was breathy and strange, and you remembered what the matron had told you. _His sanity is very fragile._

You sat there with the moonlight pouring down on the two of you, turning your skin too-white. He pulled on his blazer, first one arm, then the other. You watched him do it, like you were bearing witness.

"It's dangerous out there. And not just the matrons catching you, either. The goats are roaming the moors now, and they're attacking people." A last-ditch attempt to keep him at home, where you could tend to him and make sure no one would ever hurt him. And there was so much out there to hurt someone so fragile.

"I know," he said quietly.

You considered for a moment more before you climbed out of bed and crossed the room toward him. You took his tie between your hands and pulled it straight so it was presentable. Ever the poof, you. "Let's get you some food to take on your trip," you said. "Long walk across that ocean, right?"

"You'll help me?" he whispered.

"I couldn't stop you if I tried. But you stay safe, okay?"

He faltered, as though suddenly everything was real. And in a flash there he was again, that innocent three-year-old creature raised by cold metal machines after his father had gotten bored with him. "Okay," he said haltingly.

Your cheeks felt so very hot, and you reached out and took his hands and squeezed them. "I love you," you said.

He smiled at you, really smiled, warm and brotherly. "I love you too," he said.

And you ushered your pretty pretty robot boy out the door, and from there, into the world.


End file.
